CHAPTER XIX.

AT THE LOWEST EBB.

Isaiah i. and xxii. (701 B.C.).

In the drama of Isaiah's life we have now arrived
at the final act—a short and sharp one of a few
months. The time is 701 B.C., the fortieth year
of Isaiah's ministry, and about the twenty-sixth of
Hezekiah's reign. The background is the invasion
of Palestine by Sennacherib. The stage itself is the
city of Jerusalem. In the clear atmosphere before
the bursting of the storm Isaiah has looked round
the whole world—his world—uttering oracles on the
nations from Tyre to Egypt and from Ethiopia to
Babylon. But now the Assyrian storm has burst, and
all except the immediate neighbourhood of the prophet
is obscured. From Jerusalem Isaiah will not again lift
his eyes.

The stage is thus narrow and the time short, but the
action one of the most critical in the history of Israel,
taking rank with the Exodus from Egypt and the Return
from Babylon. To Isaiah himself it marks the summit
of his career. For half a century Zion has been preparing
for, forgetting and again preparing for, her first
and final struggle with the Assyrian. Now she is to
meet her foe, face to face across her own walls. For
forty years Isaiah has predicted for the Assyrian an307
uninterrupted path of conquest to the very gates of
Jerusalem, but certain check and confusion there.
Sennacherib has overrun the world, and leaps upon
Zion. The Jewish nation await their fate, Isaiah his
vindication, and the credit of Israel's religion, one of
the most extraordinary tests to which a spiritual faith
was ever subjected.

In the end, by the mysterious disappearance of the
Assyrian, Jerusalem was saved, the prophet was left
with his remnant and the future still open for Israel.
But at the beginning of the end such an issue was by
no means probable. Jewish panic and profligacy
almost prevented the Divine purpose, and Isaiah went
near to breaking his heart over the city, for whose redemption
he had travailed for a lifetime. He was as sure
as ever that this redemption must come, but a collapse
of the people's faith and patriotism at the eleventh hour
made its coming seem worthless. Jerusalem appeared
bent on forestalling her deliverance by moral suicide.
Despair, not of God but of the city, settled on Isaiah's
heart; and in such a mood he wrote chap. xxii. We
may entitle it therefore, though written at a time when
the tide should have been running to the full, "At the
Lowest Ebb."

We have thus stated at the outset the motive of this
chapter, because it is one of the most unexpected and
startling of all Isaiah's prophecies. In it "we can
discern precipices." Beneath our eyes, long lifted by the
prophet to behold a future stretching very far forth, this
chapter suddenly yawns, a pit of blackness. For utterness
of despair and the absolute sentence which it passes
on the citizens of Zion we have had nothing like it
from Isaiah since the evil days of Ahaz. The historical
portions of the Bible which cover this period are not cleft308
by such a crevasse, and of course the official Assyrian
annals, full as they are of the details of Sennacherib's
campaign in Palestine, know nothing of the moral
condition of Jerusalem.5454Records of the Past, i. 33 ff. vii.; Schrader's Cuneiform Inscriptions
and the Old Testament (Whitehouse's translation). Yet if we put the Hebrew
and Assyrian narratives together, and compare them
with chaps. i. and xxii. of Isaiah, we may be sure
that the following was something like the course of
events which led down to this woeful depth in Judah's
experience.

In a Syrian campaign Sennacherib's path was plain—to
begin with the Phœnician cities, march quickly
south by the level coastland, subduing the petty
chieftains upon it, meet Egypt at its southern end,
and then, when he had rid himself of his only formidable
foe, turn to the more delicate task of warfare
among the hills of Judah—a campaign which he could
scarcely undertake with a hostile force like Egypt on
his flank. This course, he tells us, he followed. "In
my third campaign, to the land of Syria I went.
Luliah (Elulæus), King of Sidon—for the fearful splendour
of my majesty overwhelmed him—fled to a
distant spot in the midst of the sea. His land I
entered." City after city fell to the invader. The
princes of Aradus, Byblus and Ashdod, by the coast,
and even Moab and Edom, far inland, sent him
their submission. He attacked Ascalon, and captured
its king. He went on, and took the Philistine cities of
Beth-dagon, Joppa, Barka and Azor, all of them
within forty miles of Jerusalem, and some even visible
from her neighbourhood. South of this group, and a little
over twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, lay Ekron; and309
here Sennacherib had so good a reason for anger, that
the inhabitants, expecting no mercy at his hands, prepared
a stubborn defence.

Ten years before this Sargon had set Padi, a vassal
of his own, as king over Ekron; but the Ekronites had
risen against Padi, put him in chains, and sent him to
their ally Hezekiah, who now held him in Jerusalem.
"These men," says Sennacherib, "were now terrified
in their hearts; the shadows of death overwhelmed
them."5555Records of the Past, i. 38; vii. 62. Before Ekron was reduced, however, the
Egyptian army arrived in Philistia, and Sennacherib
had to abandon the siege for these arch-enemies. He
defeated them in the neighbourhood, at Eltekeh, returned
to Ekron, and completed its siege. Then, while
he himself advanced southwards in pursuit of the
Egyptians, he detached a corps, which, marching eastwards
through the mountain passes, overran all Judah
and threatened Jerusalem. "And Hezekiah, King of
Judah, who had not bowed down at my feet, forty-six
of his strong cities, his castles and the smaller towns
in their neighbourhood beyond number, by casting
down ramparts and by open attack, by battle—zuk, of
the feet; nisi, hewing to pieces and casting down (?)—I
besieged, I captured.... He himself, like a bird in a
cage, inside Jerusalem, his royal city, I shut him up;
siege-towers against him I constructed, for he had
given command to renew the bulwarks of the great
gate of his city."5656Ibid., i., 40; Schrader, i., 286. But Sennacherib does not say that
he took Jerusalem, and simply closes the narrative of
his campaign with the account of large tribute which
Hezekiah sent after him to Nineveh.

310

Here, then, we have material for a graphic picture of
Jerusalem and her populace, when chaps. i. and xxii.
were uttered by Isaiah.

At Jerusalem we are within a day's journey of any
part of the territory of Judah. We feel the kingdom
throb to its centre at Assyria's first footfall on the
border. The nation's life is shuddering in upon its
capital, couriers dashing up with the first news;
fugitives hard upon them; palace, arsenal, market and
temple thrown into commotion; the politicians busy;
the engineers hard at work completing the fortifications,
leading the suburban wells to a reservoir within
the walls, levelling every house and tree outside which
could give shelter to the besiegers, and heaping up the
material on the ramparts, till there lies nothing but
a great, bare, waterless circle round a high-banked
fortress. Across this bareness the lines of fugitives
streaming to the gates; provincial officials and their
retinues; soldiers whom Hezekiah had sent out to
meet the foe, returning without even the dignity of
defeat upon them; husbandmen, with cattle and remnants
of grain in disorder; women and children; the
knaves, cowards and helpless of the whole kingdom
pouring their fear, dissoluteness and disease into the
already-unsettled populace of Jerusalem. Inside the
walls opposing political factions and a weak king;
idle crowds, swaying to every rumour and intrigue;
the ordinary restraints and regularities of life suspended,
even patriotism gone with counsel and courage,
but in their place fear and shame and greed of life.
Such was the state in which Jerusalem faced the hour
of her visitation.

Gradually the Visitant came near over the thirty
miles which lay between the capital and the border.311
Signs of the Assyrian advance were given in the sky,
and night after night the watchers on Mount Zion,
seeing the glare in the west, must have speculated
which of the cities of Judah was being burned.
Clouds of smoke across the heavens from prairie and
forest fires told how war, even if it passed, would leave
a trail of famine; and men thought with breaking
hearts of the villages and fields, heritage of the tribes
of old, that were now bare to the foot and the fire
of the foreigner. Your country is desolate; your cities
are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in
your presence, and it is desolate as the overthrow of
strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a booth
in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.
Except Jehovah of hosts had left unto us a very small
remnant, we should have been as Sodom, we should have
been like unto Gomorrah.5757 Chap. i. 7-9. Then came touch of the
enemy, the appearance of armed bands, vistas down
Jerusalem's favourite valleys of chariots, squadrons
of horsemen emerging upon the plateaus to north and
west of the city, heavy siege-towers and swarms of
men innumerable. And Elam bare the quiver, with
troops of men and horsemen; and Kir uncovered the
shield. At last they saw their fears of fifty years face
to face! Far-away names were standing by their
gates, actual bowmen and flashing shields! As
Jerusalem gazed upon the terrible Assyrian armaments,
how many of her inhabitants remembered Isaiah's
words delivered a generation before!—Behold, they shall
come with speed swiftly; none shall be weary or stumble
among them; neither shall the string of their loins be lax
nor the latchet of their shoes be broken; whose arrows312are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs
shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind;
their roaring shall be like a lion: they shall roar
like young lions. For all this His anger is not turned
away, but His hand is stretched out still.

There were, however, two supports, on which that
distracted populace within the walls still steadied
themselves. The one was the Temple-worship, the
other the Egyptian alliance.

History has many remarkable instances of peoples
betaking themselves in the hour of calamity to the
energetic discharge of the public rites of religion.
But such a resort is seldom, if ever, a real moral
conversion. It is merely physical nervousness, apprehension
for life, clutching at the one thing within reach
that feels solid, which it abandons as soon as panic has
passed. When the crowds in Jerusalem betook themselves
to the Temple, with unwonted wealth of sacrifice,
Isaiah denounced this as hypocrisy and futility. To
what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me?
saith Jehovah.... I am weary to bear them. And
when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes
from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not
hear (i. 11-15).

Isaiah might have spared his scornful orders to the
people to desist from worship. Soon afterwards they
abandoned it of their own will, but from motives very
different from those urged by him. The second
support to which Jerusalem clung was the Egyptian
alliance—the pet project of the party then in power.
They had carried it to a successful issue, taunting
Isaiah with their success.5858 See p. 238. He had continued to313
denounce it, and now the hour was approaching when
their cleverness and confidence were to be put to the
test. It was known in Jerusalem that an Egyptian
army was advancing to Sennacherib, and politicians
and people awaited the encounter with anxiety.

We are aware what happened. Egypt was beaten
at Eltekeh; the alliance was stamped a failure; Jerusalem's
last worldly hope was taken from her.
When the news reached the city, something took place,
of which our moral judgement tells us more than any
actual record of facts. The Government of Hezekiah
gave way; the rulers, whose courage and patriotism
had been identified with the Egyptian alliance, lost all
hope for their country, and fled, as Isaiah puts it, en
masse (xxii. 3). There was no battle, no defeat at
arms (id. 2, 3); but the Jewish State collapsed.

Then, when the last material hope of Judah fell, fell
her religion too. The Egyptian disappointment, while
it drove the rulers out of their false policies, drove the
people out of their unreal worship. What had been a
city of devotees became in a moment a city of revellers.
Formerly all had been sacrifices and worship, but now
feasting and blasphemy. Behold, joy and gladness,
slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking
wine: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die
(id. 13. The reference of ver. 12 is probably to chap. i.).

Now all Isaiah's ministry had been directed just against
these two things: the Egyptian alliance and the purely
formal observance of religion—trust in the world and
trust in religiousness. And together both of these
had given way, and the Assyrian was at the gates.
Truly it was the hour of Isaiah's vindication. Yet—and
this is the tragedy—it had come too late. The
prophet could not use it. The two things he said314
would collapse had collapsed, but for the people there
seemed now no help to be justified from the thing which
he said would remain. What was the use of the city's
deliverance, when the people themselves had failed!
The feelings of triumph, which the prophet might have
expressed, were swallowed up in unselfish grief over
the fate of his wayward and abandoned Jerusalem.

What aileth thee now—and in these words we can
hear the old man addressing his fickle child, whose
changefulness by this time he knew so well—what
aileth thee now that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops—we
see him standing at his door watching this
ghastly holiday—O thou that art full of shoutings, a
tumultuous city, a joyous town? What are you rejoicing
at in such an hour as this, when you have not even the
bravery of your soldiers to celebrate, when you are
without that pride which has brought songs from the
lips of a defeated people as they learned that their sons
had fallen with their faces to the foe, and has made
even the wounds of the dead borne through the gate
lips of triumph, calling to festival! For thy slain are
not slain with the sword, neither are they dead in battle.

All thy chiefs fled in heaps;

Without bow they were taken:

All thine that were found were taken in heaps;

From far had they run.

Wherefore I say, Look away from me;

Let me make bitterness bitterer by weeping.

Press not to comfort me

For the ruin of the daughter of my people.

Urge not your mad holiday upon me! For a day
of discomfiture and of breaking and of perplexity hath
the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, in the valley of vision, a315breaking down of the wall and a crying to the mountain.
These few words of prose, which follow the pathetic
elegy, have a finer pathos still. The cumulative force
of the successive clauses is very impressive: disappointment
at the eleventh hour; the sense of a being
trampled and overborne by sheer brute force; the counsels,
courage, hope and faith of fifty years crushed to blank
perplexity, and all this from Himself—the Lord, Jehovah of
hosts—in the very valley of vision, the home of prophecy;
as if He had meant of purpose to destroy these long
confidences of the past on the floor where they had
been wrestled for and asserted, and not by the force of
the foe, but by the folly of His own people, to make them
ashamed. The last clause crashes out the effect of it
all; every spiritual rampart and refuge torn down, there
is nothing left but an appeal to the hills to fall and
cover us—a breaking down of the wall and a crying to
the mountain.

On the brink of the precipice, Isaiah draws back for
a moment, to describe with some of his old fire the
appearance of the besiegers (vv. 6-8a). And this
suggests what kind of preparation Jerusalem had made
for her foe—every kind, says Isaiah, but the supreme
one. The arsenal, Solomon's forest-house, with its cedar
pillars, had been looked to (ver. 8), the fortifications inspected
and increased, and the suburban waters brought
within them (vv. 9-11a). But ye looked not unto Him
that had done this, who had brought this providence
upon you; neither had ye respect unto Him that fashioned
it long ago, whose own plan it had been. To your
alliances and fortifications you fled in the hour of
calamity, but not to Him in whose guidance the course
of calamity lay. And therefore, when your engineering
and diplomacy failed you, your religion vanished with316
them. In that day did the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, call to
weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding
with sackcloth; but, behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen
and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die. It was the
dropping of the mask. For half a century this people
had worshipped God, but they had never trusted Him
beyond the limits of their treaties and their bulwarks.
And so when their allies were defeated, and their walls
began to tremble, their religion, bound up with these
things, collapsed also; they ceased even to be men,
crying like beasts, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die. For such a state of mind Isaiah will hold out
no promise; it is the sin against the Holy Ghost, and
for it there is no forgiveness. And Jehovah of hosts
revealed Himself in mine ears. Surely this iniquity shall
not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, Jehovah
of hosts.

Back forty years the word had been, Go and tell this
people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye
indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat,
and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they
see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand
with their heart, and turn again and be healed. What
happened now was only what was foretold then: And
if there be yet a tenth in it, it shall again be for consumption.
That radical revision of judgement was now being
literally fulfilled, when Isaiah, sure at last of his remnant
within the walls of Jerusalem, was forced for their sin
to condemn even them to death.

Nevertheless, Isaiah had still respect to the ultimate
survival of a remnant. How firmly he believed in it
could not be more clearly illustrated than by the fact317
that when he had so absolutely devoted his fellow-citizens
to destruction he also took the most practical
means for securing a better political future. If there is
any reason, it can only be this, for putting the second
section of chap. xxii., which advocates a change of
ministry in the city (vv. 15-22), so close to the first,
which sees ahead nothing but destruction for the State
(vv. 1-14).

The mayor of the palace at this time was one Shebna,
also called minister or deputy (lit. friend of the king).
That his father is not named implies perhaps that
Shebna was a foreigner; his own name betrays a Syrian
origin; and he has been justly supposed to be the leader
of the party then in power, whose policy was the
Egyptian alliance, and whom in these latter years Isaiah
had so frequently denounced as the root of Judah's
bitterness. To this unfamilied intruder, who had sought
to establish himself in Jerusalem, after the manner of
those days, by hewing himself a great sepulchre, Isaiah
brought sentence of violent banishment: Behold, Jehovah
will be hurling, hurling thee away, thou big man, and
crumpling, crumpling thee together. He will roll, roll thee
on, thou rolling-stone, like a ball thrown out on broad
level ground; there shall thou die, and there shall be the
chariots of thy glory, thou shame of the house of thy lord.
And I thrust thee from thy post, and from thy station do
they pull thee down. This vagabond was not to die in
his bed, nor to be gathered in his big tomb to the people
on whom he had foisted himself. He should continue
a rolling-stone. For him, like Cain, there was a land
of Nod; and upon it he was to find a vagabond's
death.

To fill this upstart's place, Isaiah solemnly designated
a man with a father: Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. The318
formulas he uses are perhaps the official ones customary
upon induction to an office. But it may be
also, that Isaiah has woven into these some expressions
of even greater promise than usual. For this change
of office-bearers was critical, and the overthrow of the
"party of action" meant to Isaiah the beginning of
the blessed future. And it shall come to pass that in
that day I will call My servant Eliakim, the son of
Hilkiah; and I will clothe him with thy robe, and with
thy girdle will I strengthen him, and thine administration
will I give into his hand, and he shall be for
a father to the inhabitant of Jerusalem and to the
house of Judah. And I will set the key of the house of
David upon his shoulder; and he shall open, and none
shut: and he shall shut, and none open. And I will
hammer him in, a nail in a firm place, and he shall be
for a throne of glory to his father's house. Thus to the
last Isaiah will not allow Shebna to forget that he is
without root among the people of God, that he has
neither father nor family.

But a family is a temptation, and the weight of
it may drag even the man of the Lord's own hammering
out of his place. This very year we find
Eliakim in Shebna's post,5959Isa. xxxvi. 3. and Shebna reduced to
be secretary; but Eliakim's family seem to have taken
advantage of their relative's position, and either at
the time he was designated, or more probably later,
Isaiah wrote two sentences of warning upon the
dangers of nepotism. Catching at the figure, with
which his designation of Eliakim closed, that Eliakim
would be a peg in a solid wall, a throne on which the
glory of his father's house might settle, Isaiah reminds319
the much-encumbered statesman that the firmest peg
will give way if you hang too much on it, the strongest
man be pulled down by his dependent and indolent
family. They shall hang upon him all the weight of his
father's house, the scions and the offspring (terms contrasted
as degrees of worth), all the little vessels, from
the vessels of cups to all the vessels of flagons. In
that day, saith Jehovah of hosts, shall the peg that was
knocked into a firm place give way, and it shall be knocked
out and fall, and down shall be cut the burden that was
upon it, for Jehovah hath spoken.

So we have not one, but a couple of tragedies.
Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, follows Shebna, the son
of Nobody. The fate of the overburdened nail is as
grievous as that of the rolling stone. It is easy to pass
this prophecy over as a trivial incident; but when we
have carefully analysed each verse, restored to the
words their exact shade of signification, and set them
in their proper contrasts, we perceive the outlines of
two social dramas, which it requires very little imagination
to invest with engrossing moral interest.